My Aryan princess

A place in the family

Life with a rising gang member: beatings, dope and a feeling of belonging

There’s no pain, at first, when knuckles strike bone. Just a flash of bright light, a loud buzz, a brain reboot.

Carol Blevins lives with men who express frustration with their fists, so she knows how to take a punch.

But this one felt different. It was as if she’d walked into a bowling ball – one dropped from an overpass.

Micheal “Crash” Bianculli is small, 5 foot 8 inches, a buck sixty, but he was fueled by heroin withdrawal when he met Carol at a North Dallas hotel in August 2007. It didn’t take long for his flint-like temper to spark.

“My face was black, both my eyes were black,” Carol said. “I remember being thrown around a hotel room and wondering when the cops were going to come. And they never came.”

Crash says he beat Carol the way some people discipline a dog – reluctantly, and always as a last resort.

One of the government’s key confidential informants during a landmark six-year federal investigation of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. Her spy work led to the conviction of at least 13 members of the white supremacist gang, including James “Skitz” Sampsell, who was the Brotherhood’s only general outside of prison.

Soon after his arrest in January 2013, agents say, Skitz ordered gang members to hunt Carol down and kill her.

Carol has been enrolled at DeVry University since October. She’s studying computer network administration.

The 54-year-old crown jewel of a six-year federal investigation into the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. James “Skitz” Sampsell was confidential informant Carol Blevins’ main mark.

His arrest allowed the government to claim a clean sweep of the extremist group, the arrest of every general, major and captain, as well as other senior officers. Agents say it was the first time racketeering laws have been used to completely dismantle the leadership of a criminal enterprise. Skitz is serving an 11-year, 8-month sentence at a medium-security federal prison in Arkansas.

A former ABT captain and federal confidential informant. Micheal “Crash” Bianculli, 48, introduced Carol Blevins to the racist gang in 2007 and claimed her as his “featherwood,” a subservient wife or girlfriend. After double-crossing ABT officers and federal agents, Crash was thrown out of the gang and cut from the confidential informant program. He’s currently serving a six-month sentence for felony theft at a state prison in Dallas County.

The revered former leader of the ABT who was once called “the general of generals” by a federal prosecutor. The mustachioed 54-year-old was found dead, slumped over the wheel of his pickup truck, along a highway outside Houston in May 2011.

His death prompted suspicion that he was poisoned, and of a power struggle within the Brotherhood, but he died of natural causes, according to a Harris County coroner’s report.

A soldier in the ABT and confidential informant Carol Blevins’ former fiancé. Goode received a 30-year sentence for possession of methamphetamine after Blevins testified about his involvement in the Brotherhood.

Goode is incarcerated at a state prison in Huntsville. He was denied parole earlier this month.

An Army reserve colonel and senior special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Houston. He led a statewide, multi-agency task force consisting of 80 federal, state and local law enforcement officials from 2008 to 2013. The investigation resulted in the indictment and conviction of 73 senior members of the ABT, which was described in 2012 as the nation’s most violent extremist group by the Anti-Defamation League.

Boehning, 53, received the ATF Distinguished Service Medal and the U.S. Department of Justice Federal Law Enforcement Investigative Excellence Award, and he was one of 15 officers who won the U.S. Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service in 2015, the second-highest honor in law enforcement.

He is one of two court-recognized experts qualified to testify about the ABT.

A 48-year-old Carrollton gang detective and deputized task force officer with Homeland Security Investigations. Lair was confidential informant Carol Blevins’ main handler and one of seven lead case agents during the federal investigation of the ABT.

He received the U.S. Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service in 2015, the second-highest honor in law enforcement; the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations International Task Force Officer of the Year award in 2013; the ATF Honor Award presented by ATF Director Thomas E. Brandon in 2015; and a major case award from the Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw in 2013.

He is one of two court-recognized experts qualified to testify about the ABT.

Last year, he sipped a double bourbon and Coke at a biker bar in Tyler, remembering a time when Carol threatened to report his drug dealing to police.

“I told her to sit her bitch a-- down or I was going to kill her,” he said. “And I was dead serious, I would have killed her. I’m not joking, and that’s not a figure of speech.”

Violence was a fixture in their relationship, the way date night is for other couples.

The drama was as addictive as the drugs.

“It’s hard to explain unless you’re in it,” said Carol, who was 30 at the time. “Crash would beat, beat, beat and then beg me to forgive him. It’s twisted, but it made me feel like I had some control.”

In Carol’s world, Crash was a catch.

He was a 39-year-old captain in the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, and a comer.

He commanded a few hundred ABT soldiers and moved about $20,000 worth of narcotics through North Texas each week.

Crash proposed to Carol their first night together and claimed her as his girlfriend, a “featherwood.” He bought her a $700 Seiko watch to match his own and a $2,000 diamond engagement ring.

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His-and-her tattoos sealed the deal – “Crash” in italic across her lower back, “Carol” on his left forearm.

“When it was good, it was good,” Carol said. “He did treat me like a princess.”

She shopped for wedding dresses with her mother, bought jewelry, and imagined a church wedding with sprays of red and white roses, the Brotherhood’s signature colors. In the fantasy, her family sat on one side of the chapel, eyes shining with approval and pride; on the other, baldheaded Aryan Brothers grinned in sunglasses.

“I was gung-ho ABT,” she said. “It made perfect sense to me.”

The ABT refers to itself as “the family,” an appeal to people from broken homes, those with corrosive drug habits and smoldering anger.

Many of its members grow up poor, white and burdened by the word “trash.”

Carol’s childhood was comparatively carefree.

She grew up in an insular white world with white friends, a place where racial stereotypes were assumed to be true, perhaps because no one of color was there to challenge them.

It was a time when Archie Bunker’s blue-collar bigotry gave way to racist riffs by George Jefferson, each character ignorant but goodhearted, projecting full-color comedy through a black and white negative.

At home, her dad grumbled, “Don’t you dare bring home a n-----,” but her mother often tut-tutted him into silence.

“I grew up with it,” Carol said. “Once I was on the street, it reinforced every racial stereotype – blacks, Asians, Latinos, all of them.”

Carol became a racist by cultural proxy.

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She used the n-word so often it lost its sting, so she sprinkled in the ABT’s vile epithet, “toads.”

After a decade of hurt, Carol started to act hard.

“Nobody messed with me back then, especially after Crash taught me I was an Aryan princess,” she said. “I thought very highly of myself.”

Carol Blevins and her former fiancé Micheal “Crash” Bianculli discussed the past at the Brass Star, a Tyler pool hall, in the summer of 2016. (Nathan Hunsinger/Staff Photographer)

But Crash sensed something else in his fiancée.

She seemed panicked underneath the pride – as if she had stumbled out of a desert and was gulping cool water.

“Carol just has a need to be part of something,” he said. “And it doesn’t make a s--- difference who she’s with, what color, race, nationality, or what job they do. She just has a need to belong.”

Lessons and liabilities

The Brotherhood eventually evolved into an organized crime syndicate operating outside prison, and its leaders realized white separatism was bad for business.

The gang’s constitution was revised to reflect new priorities: The ABT “is no longer solely based on the precepts of racial ideology.”

If there was money in it, the Brotherhood would work with other gangs.

Crash thrived under the new edict.

The number “14” signifies the number of words in a well-known slogan of the white supremacist movement: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

“8” represents “H,” the eighth letter of the alphabet. The number 88, or “HH,” is shorthand for the Nazis’ chant “Heil Hitler.”

The SS bolts, or sig runes, are a common white supremacist/neo-Nazi symbol derived from Schutzstaffel (SS) of Nazi Germany. The SS, led by Heinrich Himmler, maintained the police state of Nazi Germany.

The swastika was the first symbol of Nazism and remains strongly associated with it in the Western world.

With Latino relatives at home, and a crack cocaine business dependent on black drug dealers, he navigated neighborhoods where people eyeball white boys – especially white boys with Nazi tats – but understand it often takes a racial plurality to get paid.

Carol learned that lesson the hard way.

The Brotherhood urges new recruits to take their place atop a mythical human hierarchy, one sorted by skin color. Women cannot join the gang, technically, but Carol bought into her white birthright, something akin to being born into aristocracy.

So, a few days after meeting Crash, a group of black men catcalled as she walked across a hotel parking lot. Carol spun and uncorked a stream of vulgarities, racial epithets and threats.

“My man is ABT,” she said. “He’ll kick all your asses.”

Seething, the men marched behind her to a nearby mechanic shop, prepared to put a beat-down on Crash.

The business owner, who was black, brokered peace as Crash dragged Carol into a nearby office.

“I slapped the dog s--- out of her, two or three times,” Crash said. “That bitch almost got me killed that day.”

Carol broke featherwood rule No. 1: “Keep your mouth shut.”

Female associates of the ABT, or featherwoods, are expected to obey orders without question, accept physical abuse without complaint and serve gang members’ sexual and domestic needs. Though they may be wives and girlfriends of ABT members, women can’t be admitted as official members. Nevertheless, four featherwoods were prosecuted as part of the sweeping indictment of ABT leadership in 2013.

As in life, ABT policy and practice are often two very different things.

On one hand, gang leaders extol women as the wellspring of the race. They should be coveted, protected and respected. On the other, they are chattel, disposable and interchangeable, serfs in a male monarchy.

“Carol wanted to be an ABT old lady,” Crash said, “and that’s how she was treated.”

Featherwoods are expected to be servile, deferential and unflinchingly loyal.

They know when to look away – you can’t testify to what you don’t see – and to cast their eyes downward when entering a room full of brothers. They know how to be invisible while filling drinks and delivering food, but savvy enough to serve the ranking officer in the room first.

Carol mastered the masquerade.

Until she hit the crack pipe.

“Aryan Princess was her nickname, and at times she could be just that,” Crash said. “The problem was she always seemed to have a scam for what she wanted, or there was an ultimatum. And that’s when she became a liability.”

Crash’s gambit

Hustlers play positional pool, a game of angles and spin.

Crash and Steve Lair, a gang detective from the Carrollton Police Department, understood the finesse of the game when they met in 2005.

Lair busted Crash for pimping and identity theft. But instead of booking him, he proposed a deal.

Crash, shooting pool last year in Tyler, was paid by police to pass along information about fellow gang members. (Nathan Hunsinger/Staff Photographer)

If the ABT captain provided information about the gang, his charges would disappear.

Crash considered his options, neither of them good.

With a lengthy criminal record, a conviction might mean several years in state prison. But if the Brotherhood discovered the betrayal, he would be marked for death.

Crash, ever the hustler, tried to play both sides.

He figured he’d keep the ABT in the dark, and by having a cop on speed dial, gain street cred. In later years, Crash bragged to Carol and others about being connected and protected by the law – a claim that was part fact, part front.

Each man kept secrets.

Crash played coy about his criminal life, and Lair deflected questions about police business.

They came up with a phrase to describe the mutual deception: “What’s understood need not be discussed.”

“Steve always called me the ABT historian,” Crash said. “He’d call me if he had questions about the family or if he needed to know who someone was. We spent hours and hours on the phone.”

Frank “Pancho” Roch Jr. was the longtime leader of the ABT.

A committee of five generals runs the Brotherhood and appoints its chairman.

From 2001 to 2011, that man was Frank “Pancho” Roch Jr., a longtime romantic friend of Crash’s mother.

Pancho was a Messianic figure in the ABT, worshipped for his granite-like persona – cold, hard, smooth – and a ruthless gravitas when it came to Brotherhood business.

Police knew his malevolent reputation, but little else.

Crash demystified the man.

He began recording phone calls with Pancho and other ABT leaders in June 2005, opening a spigot of new information.

Police gained insight about the inner workings of the gang, its “blood in, blood out” membership doctrine and the temperament of its leaders. They learned about the ABT’s delicate relationship with Mexican gangs and how large quantities of methamphetamine made it across the border.

Initiates to the ABT swear lifelong allegiance to the gang with a blood oath, meaning they must kill to get in and will be killed if they try to get out.

Membership in the ABT is limited to members of the white/Aryan race. Homosexuals, bisexuals, police/prison officials, informants and persons who have committed sex crimes are barred from membership.

Crash opened the door, Lair turned on the light, and the FBI walked in the room.

“I trusted Steve,” Crash said. “He seemed like a friend, until the point I realized he wasn’t. He used my information to get where he wanted.”

The U.S. Department of Justice monitored the ABT as it mutated from a prison gang into a crime family, but with small numbers and limited reach, the Brotherhood didn’t merit a mention in the bureau’s 2005 gang assessment report.

A pair of ghastly Dallas-area murders in August 2006, and similar crimes near Houston, set off warning bells.

An ABT officer slit the throat of a 43-year-old man from Fort Worth he believed was a snitch, and gang members murdered, dismembered and dumped a 19-year-old Mesquite woman’s body in a reservoir northeast of Dallas.

Days later, an FBI agent asked Crash to help locate her body.

Crash led officers to a public boat ramp on the southwest side of Lake Ray Hubbard, where his sources said Brothers discarded her body. Cadaver dogs and dive teams were unable to locate her remains. They’ve never been recovered.

Crash’s run as an informant was interrupted in early 2008, when he was sentenced to three years in state prison for beating his mother.

The feds flirted with the idea of intervening in the case, but decided against it, in part, because they hoped he might be more useful inside the penitentiary.

Drug scourge

Carol visited Crash once in prison.

He sat behind Plexiglas, wore a white jumpsuit, spoke into a phone.

“He just sat there saying, ‘Do this, do this, do this,’ ” Carol said. “ ‘Lie about this, and this and that. Go here and here and here.’ And I just got tired of it. I was done listening to his bulls---.”

Crash and Carol cuddled and kissed when they met at a Tyler pool hall in the summer of 2016, but after about an hour of harmony, they reverted to old acrimony. Carol described the relationship this way: “Crash would beat, beat, beat and then beg me to forgive him. It’s twisted, but it made me feel like I had some control.” (Nathan Hunsinger/Staff Photographer)

She marched out 45 minutes into a two-hour visit.

It was a cold move.

Gang members do hard time in Texas.

They’re locked alone in a cell about the size of a walk-in closet – 9 feet by 7 feet – all day and night, except for a solitary hour of recreation time.

Carol moved home to Murphy, where she was hired and fired from a series of jobs.

Ike Blevins said his daughter usually lasted two weeks.

“They’d catch her doing drugs,” he said, “or she’d have one of her outbursts and scream at them like she screams at me.”

Her instability often pivoted on paranoia, Ike said, whether caused by bipolar disorder or drugs.

Carol is what’s known as a “trash can junkie,” an addict who will abuse just about any street or prescription drug. But when it’s her money, she buys methamphetamine.

Carol said it begins as an uneasy sense, more than a sound, the flutter-in-the-gut feeling of sitting alone in an empty house, late at night – a radio hiss in the distance, bare feet across the back porch, water quivering into a low boil.

Three times during Crash’s three-year sentence, Carol showed up at Green Oaks psychiatric hospital, considering suicide.

She told doctors in April 2010 that her boyfriend tried to choke her to death with a pillowcase (true), and later expressed fear when he was released from prison.

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Ike Blevins paid college expenses each of the three times Carol enrolled.

She was studying audio engineering at Collin College in November 2010 when Crash was released from prison.

He sent a cab to pick Carol up at the Plano campus. They reunited at a Whataburger in Carrollton.

“He was fat and I was fat and we hugged and I was genuinely glad to see him,” Carol said. “I loved him at one time, but I didn’t know where it was going.”

Crash quickly regained favor with the feds.

Eleven days after his release, agents with Homeland Security Investigations signed him as a $500-a-week confidential informant.

Soon after, Crash called his old connection – “Pancho,” the ABT’s top general – and asked for a cut of the Brotherhood’s business selling stolen heavy-duty trucks to a Mexican drug cartel.

Pancho delegated the details to James “Skitz” Sampsell, who was then a major with an ABT cell in Odessa.

The feds financed the deal. Agents handed Crash an envelope with $8,500 in cash.

They told him to pay Skitz $6,000 for the stolen property and use $2,500 for expenses.

Crash immediately bought a $200 bag of crack.

He and Carol smoked most of it during the five-hour drive to East Texas the next day.

The deal went down without a hitch, except for this – Crash skimmed money from the government and scammed Skitz and another ABT officer out of $2,000.

The feds suspected the double-cross by the time he and Carol rolled back into Dallas.

Crash hung up on agents when they ordered him to deliver the stolen trucks. He spent the Brotherhood’s money on crack cocaine.

The bender lasted nearly two days.

Crash and Carol stood in a second-story room of an Extended Stay America hotel. The air was acrid, hazy with smoke from drug pipes, throbbing with voices and party music.

Carol stepped toward Crash. She never saw the punch coming.

It landed below her left eye, cracking her cheekbone.

“I was going to hug him,” Carol said. “He thought I was going to hit him.”

The crowd called Crash out for the buzz kill, so he and Carol decided to leave.

Carrollton gang detective Steve Lair persuaded Crash to betray the ABT in 2005, and later as an officer for Homeland Security Investigations, he cultivated a similar relationship with Carol. (David Woo/Staff Photographer)

An officer found $1,236 in Crash’s pocket and crack cocaine in his bag. After a pat-down, Carol was deemed clean and left to wait alone in the back seat of a squad car.

An officer eventually swung the door open, and a man with square shoulders and a bald head stepped forward. He wore jeans and a jacket, but had an informal air.

It was Steve Lair, the Carrollton cop who five years earlier had persuaded Crash to betray the Aryan Brotherhood. Now he was a deputized officer with Homeland Security Investigations.

“Are you Carol Blevins?” Lair asked, bending down to look at her swollen face. He sniffed disapproval and stepped away.

Carol thought nothing of it at the time – a vague face, on a drug-fogged night, during a blurry time in her life.

Some moments seem like that, trivial and incremental, tick-tick-ticks on a timepiece counting down the end.

Carol’s future is more uncertain than most. Maybe that’s why, when she ruminates about the waste of her life, and all the wreckage, her thoughts inevitably drift to the one towering thing she’s done right.

Fleeting seconds marked the beginning of her journey, in the back of a squad car, during a chance meeting with an acting federal agent.

Officers discovered an email from Carol on Crash’s phone that night.

“You are my love, my life and everything I am. I am sorry for my mistakes. If I need to prove my loyalty, I will do anything you ask. I will die for you. I will kill for you.”

Police let her go.

Carol walked a half-block to a gas station, called her dad, and begged him to rescue her again.

She waited under the pallid discord of a street light, smoking a cigarette.

Retracing her past, Carol huddles with a cigarette near where she lived for a short time in Denver. (Nathan Hunsinger/Staff Photographer)

Her fiancé was headed back to prison, a fate she escaped by luck. Her face was broken and blackened the color of eggplant, an unremarkable fact in a gang that implicitly condones the abuse of women, and explicitly strips them of dignity.

None of that mattered. Carol had found a family.

“At no point did I think about stopping seeing guys in the ABT,” she said. “It was my life now.”